EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

We find ourselves in the aftermath of the Second Great War, the carnage and the confusion of the routing of Band of Brothers and their vassals from Delve and Querious. The balance of power has been overturned after three years of violence. The last spastic tremors of the conflict reverberate in the galactic north and northeast as the remaining BoB-aligned forces are besieged, lesser ripples in the wake of a greater drama.  Increasingly, players are asking themselves: Now what?

From the perspective of a 0.0 inhabitant, the political and geographic dislocation is great. Entire power blocs have been destroyed or rendered irrelevant. Long-standing coalitions have lost their strategic purpose, not unlike NATO immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. Refugees of the losing side have had to evacuate their assets with haste and withdraw to Empire or to safer locales in 0.0, leaving many corporations in unfamiliar territory.

Yet, while the Great War captured the imagination of both the players and the media, only a small proportion of the playerbase directly participated in it. One might bandy about rough figures of twenty to thirty thousand participants on either side of the war, yet EVE has 300,000 subscribers. The vast bulk of those pilots live in protected Empire territories, patrolled by unkillable NPC 'police' and insulated from the violence of 0.0. Bring up the map with 'pilots in space' during Euro Prime, and it seems clear that 80% or more of the population blunders through EVE in Empire, intolerably free of the threat of violence. The Great War may have thrown the markets of Empire into disarray on a recurring basis, but the Empire-dwellers themselves remained effectively untouched. Unacceptable.

Historically, Empire has been an oasis of idyllic space-pacifism. Pilots mine, run missions and produce with little risk of hostile activity. On the rare occasion that a corporate war (a formal mechanic that allows corporations to shoot each other's pilots without police intervention while in high security space) occurs, conflict is limited to the participating organizations rather than the population as a whole. When the Privateer Alliance began experimenting with cutting-edge gameplay by declaring corporate war on everyone - every alliance and every major high-population empire-dwelling corporation - the result was delightful mass chaos. But because Empire is where the bulk of CCP's subscription money comes from, the howls of wounded carebears provoked a patch to drastically limit the scale of corporate war. Empire was safe once more - until the coming of Jihad.